


(The Pitcher Must) Throw the Ball

by mossy_kit



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Canada Moist Talkers (Blaseball Team), Gen, Kansas City Breath Mints (Blaseball Team), Ruby Tuesday, and the Crabs for a minute or two, blaseball-typical incinerations, which is what the major character death warning is about
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:27:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27103441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mossy_kit/pseuds/mossy_kit
Summary: Polkadot Patterson reflects on a long blaseball career.A bit of a character study following Dot from zero star rookie to superstar pitcher to shelled-but-not-forgotten. Seasons 1-9.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13
Collections: Canada Moist Talkers Fanfiction





	1. The Shape of it All

Inside their shell, Polkadot Patterson slept.

Time was a laughable concept, after what felt like years in the dark, so mostly, they wandered through waking dreams and deep oblivion. Memories played themselves out in pastel relief; one lazy summer day, when they’d gone out with their dad and sister to a park, tossed a ball around. Their sister’s hand-me-down glove had been way too big for them, and their throws went wide and short with reckless abandon, but it didn’t matter. In the shell, they curled their hand and all its surplus fingers around the memory of that first blaseball, almost too big for them to hold at all.

“I’m gonna play in the ILB someday!” they exclaimed, and their dad had ruffled their hair and replied, “I bet you will.”

And then it was the day of their very first game with the Breath Mints, and they were stepping up to the mound, trying to breathe through the first day jitters. Around them, the stands of the FreshDome rose so much higher than they seemed in practice, and there were so many people, all watching at once. They needed to do well – needed to pull their weight, needed to prove that they deserved to be here. They looked up one more time, to the stands, and saw them; their father and sister, who flew all the way out to Kansas City for their first game, holding a sign with a cartoon version of them launching a flaming pitch. “Dot’s our ace!” it said, and they smiled a little at that. Then they took one more breath, wound up, and pitched the ball.

The score for that game, as the dust settled, was a brutal 5-16 for the Flowers. When the game was over, they slunk back to the dugout, thinking they’d manage the shortest career in the ILB after getting kicked out for letting sixteen whole runs go. But when they got back, their team swept them up in a flurry of excitement.

“Big first game! How’s it feel?” asked Boyfriend, a huge smile on their face.

“I’m… just glad to be here,” they replied, not quite meeting their eyes.

“Flowers are good this year,” said Eizabeth, shaking her head a little. “We’ll get ‘em next time. You coming for ice cream?”

“Really?” Dot asked.

“Yeah, of course!” Boyfriend said, throwing an arm around their shoulder. “It’s a team tradition!”

Dot nodded, letting themselves be swept back into the locker room. They could almost taste the sweet richness of that ice cream, could see the whole afternoon so vividly – the team swapping stories about great games and insane plays and dumb pranks they’d pulled. They’d mostly just listened, letting the conversation flow over them in waves. There was a warmth there, an ease, like an old sweater; like they belonged.

They remembered the practicing too – gruelling, endless, thrilling hours of it, 7 am mornings and 7pm nights, lunches at little holes-in-the-wall or on the field under the Kansas sun. The cheap little apartment they had in the city, its walls plastered with blaseball posters and family photos, was nothing more than a bed to sleep in and an overflowing garbage can full of empty takeout containers, as they woke up and threw balls and then sat in the dugout and then threw some more pitches after everyone else went home. Every minute, tired or hot or sweaty, bad pitches or good – it didn’t matter, Dot loved them all, with a breathless passion born of years of love for the game.

And it wasn’t always easy; they missed home, and they missed their friends, and adapting to the team came with its challenges. Dot’s attempts at jokes or rapport seemed to fall flat about as often as they landed, at first, and after years of the same small town, their people skills left something to be desired. Still, they showed up, studied the rhythms of the conversation almost as much as the game, and it got easier, in time.

They remembered the first win they’d ever had. They’d managed twelve straight losses, some brutal, some almost close enough to taste. Before the thirteenth, against the same pitcher who they had faced during that disastrous first game, they had excused themselves and went to the bathroom, splashed water on their face, and stood in front of the mirror.

“You are Polkadot Patterson,” they said to themselves. “You earned your spot on this team, just like they did. You work just as hard as anyone else here, and you deserve to be here.”

Their reflection nodded back at them, determination settling over their face and cooling their racing thoughts.

“You’ve been working really hard, and you’re getting a lot better. This is going to work out. You will go out there and you will pitch a really great game. For the team.”

And then they’d walked out to the mound, all composure and laser focus, and done just that. Despite a solid performance from the Flowers, they’d held on, stubborn and persistent, until the last pitch of the ninth inning and there it was: their first victory, 4-3. They still remembered the rush of it all, the congratulations from their teammates – the joy in the last few pitches as they’d realized they had done it. They fought their way to more wins, and by the end of the season, they weren’t good – hell, they were still definitely the weakest pitcher on the team, but damn if they weren’t the most determined.

The season’s end had rolled around, and the Mints had held a picnic potluck, in a meadow outside town. Dot had brought a sort of lumpy seven-layer dip, and the team had sat around, goofing around and retelling the season’s best stories as they waited for the blessing and decree votes to come in.

Dot had just poured themselves a cup of iced peppermint tea and turned back to the team when something seized them, something that felt like it was tearing them apart from the inside, like exploratory grasping somewhere between muscle and bone. The cup fell from their hand, spewing tea across the grass.

“POLKADOT PATTERSON,” had come a voice in their mind, and all at once they were more afraid than they had ever been in their entire life. “YOU HAVE BEEN BLESSED.”

Dot fell to their knees, cradling their arms, burning with phantom fire, to their chest, choking back a scream. This must be it for them, they thought, they were going to die, right there and right then. Their field of vision blurred, and they stared, wide eyed, into the grass beneath them.

“Dot…?” a teammate said, but they could focus on nothing but their body ripping itself apart, and then knitting itself back together in ways that felt hauntingly, grotesquely wrong.

“LOOK AT WHAT I HAVE SHOWN YOU.” Came the voice, again, and the waves of shock receded a little, and with eyes still bleary, Dot looked up. Nothing was different, and at the same time, nothing at all was the same; it was like a fog was lifted. In that moment, they understood an entirely new dimension to the game, understood instantly why they had not thrown well enough before, understood instantly how to make it worlds better. They could see the connections; could see everything.

“Are you…” came another voice, but they could make no answer.

Dot wiped their face with the back of their hand, and picked themselves up to stand unsteadily. In their hand – oh, god, their hand, what was wrong with their hand, they thought distantly – there was a blaseball, one that had not been there before, and it was starting to dawn on them now. “THE PITCHER MUST THROW THE BALL.”

They turned on a heel, locked their gaze on the team’s pitching target, and threw the ball dead centre into the target, and then they picked up another ball from the ground, and then they did it again, and then again for good measure.

As the third collided with the foam with a thick, muffled thump, they blinked again, and realized what they had done. They turned back, and realized the Mints were staring at them, eyes wide, and some of them looked almost… afraid. Afraid for them… or of them?

They looked up to the screen the team had rigged up to show the election news.

 _“The Baltimore Crabs stole the best pitcher in the league,”_ it said, in simple white serif, and then there it was: _“Polkadot Patterson, from the Kansas City Breath Mints.”_

“I…” they said, and then they stopped, and… what was wrong with their voice? Why did it sound so different? What had happened to them?

What do you even say to something like that?


	2. Eighty-Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dot finds themselves struggling to adapt to their new team and their new status.

They had barely even gotten to say goodbye – only a couple days later, they were on a plane to Baltimore.

They remembered their tiny, sterile little apartment out there, even smaller than the last, remembered rehanging the posters and redecorating until it felt like theirs, remembered their new fingers dipping into their food as they ate and getting slammed in drawers as they tried to figure out how they worked, outside of throwing the ball. Their hands, the ten original fingers, still held their own knowledge; knew how to angle the blade of a whittling knife, or curl around the cool steel of a dumbbell, or weave deftly around a crochet hook, but these new fingers seemed to know no texture but the leather of a blaseball, no movement but the windup of a pitch.

Sometimes it even felt like those fingers, the 77 new ones, didn’t belong to the Dot who had thrown a hundred pitches behind their hometown field when they were fifteen, after they’d made Blittle League but only by a hair, whose coach had pulled them aside and warned them that they might not get as much play time as some of the other pitchers, that they had work to do. Whose dad had picked them up and taken them to a movie, bought them a massive popcorn to share, and told them how incredibly proud of them he was. The Dot who had pushed and pushed and pushed and by the time the finals had rolled around, had pitched a finals game to victory.

Those strange new fingers, which still hadn’t figured out how to do anything except spin the ball in the fourth dimension, belonged to Polkadot Patterson, Five Star Pitcher, Pride of the Team, and maybe, people whispered, Conduit of the Gods.

They heard them talk – the fans, their teammates. Sometimes it was this weird reverence, not only the admiration of a fan but the adoration of a… almost like a worship? And it was other players, sometimes, looking afraid facing them down. And it was overhearing their own team members, they way they talked about them when they thought they were alone, complaining that they weren’t even, like, a regular player anymore, that it wasn’t fair.

“Yeah, Patterson’s pitching again…” they’d heard once, passing by one of the smaller break rooms. Tillman Henderson’s voice was practically dripping with contempt, curling around their name like it had spoiled in his mouth. “God, they think they own the place, just because they got some stupid blessing. It’s like, cheating or something. It’s not like they’re actually good.”

For a moment, Dot floundered, trying to decide whether to confront them or move on or just turn around and go home.

“I gotta say,” said another voice – maybe one of the assistant coaches? – “Those fingers are kinda creepy. Like, have you ever watched them pitch? Gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

“I know! Yikes…” finished Tillman.

Dot turned around and left, as quietly as they’d come.

And then they were nursing a drink at one of the mandatory team-building dinners, and trying to ignore a massive headache, and trying not to wince as the conversation happened around them. It wasn’t like… like anyone was ignoring them, but nobody was really talking to them, either.

The coach, at the head of the table, and one of the fielders, beside Dot, were talking loudly about some play he’d made last game, so they barely managed to hear it over the hubbub – their own name, in a low voice, and they looked over as covertly as they could, saw Adalberto Tosser look away quickly.

Dot looked back down to their food, set their spine straight, took another bite. Maybe it was just coincidence, they thought to themselves, or something like it… but something in their gut was hard and coiled, and the rest of the meal, they didn’t say anything, just ate mechanically and tried not to think much at all. He was overly cheery, the next time they practiced, even tried to pull them aside and explain that he was just "talking about how impressed he was with their technique"; Dot pitched nothing but blistering, impossible fastballs, struck out nearly every batter until the coach told them to just go pitch at a target so everyone could practice. 

On the field, maybe that’s who they were; the Maxed-out Pitcher, Polkadot Patterson, the one who was just a little apart from everyone else, a crack that became a rift that became a canyon.

The one who stood looking a little cold, a little distant, in team pictures, who could never quite break into the conversation right, who didn’t get the inside joke, who had barely figured it out back in Kansas City and was completely lost, again. The one who never quite knew how to respond to the questions without sounding like they were reading off a script: how do you pitch like that? How does it feel?

“I’m just pleased to be able to be a valuable team member,” they’d said once, in an interview with a local news station, among other things. That evening, they’d idly flipped to the channel it was running on. They looked cool, and composed, and regal. Their hands were still and neat and folded up small in their lap, and they were making the right amount of eye contact with the host, and they looked every bit the part. They shut off the interview before it was even halfway through.

When they were lying awake in bed, alone, after another one of those awkward nights, their own introversion and their unsettling fingers and their strange new status blending into a haze of respectful distance, maybe that person, that serene, aloof star, maybe that was who they wanted to be.

Easier to be them than the Dot who woke up screaming sometimes from nightmares where their own limbs moved without their control, feeling themselves pitch and pitch and pitch beyond where any physical body should be able to, and then pitch again. Easier than the Dot who wondered whether the thrill they still got from a good game was earned, anymore, whether it was still theirs at all. Whether they were even doing it themselves or whether it was the Peanut who threw with those hands.

And it really was easier, in the end. To be distantly polite, to go home alone after practice. To go out back to the field and pitch fastballs until everything but the game faded away, until they didn’t feel like they were just a boat without an anchor.


	3. Ablaze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another season, another new team. Dot tries to keep their distance as the Talkers suffer losses.

When the next election rolled around, they couldn’t muster much surprise at being stolen by the Moist Talkers, so they packed up again and said a few more goodbyes and moved to Sunken Halifax, even further away from their hometown and everything they’d ever known. For months, their soggy new basement suite remained stacked with boxes, the only things unpacked the absolute essentials.

Their new team reached out, that first season. They got invited to the watch parties in tiny little apartments, the “urban adventuring”, the dinners out after games they won with not-so-strictly human grace. They turned almost all of them down. What use was it to get attached? They’d go to the Shoe Thieves, or the Tigers next, or whatever other team managed enough divine favor to steal the Strongest Pitcher in the League, and anyway, the Talkers were close, had been together for a while. Who were they to think they could be a part of that, or that they wanted to be?

They saw how some of the Talkers looked at them – like they were intimidated, when they picked up the ball. The way some of their eyes followed their extra fingers, how spooked they got when Dot would enter a room too quietly.

They went home alone, and called their sister or their dad, and danced alone in the kitchen, and got up at four in the morning to put a few more marks on a well-battered target, only to go home before everyone arrived. Then they’d arrive five minutes before the game, warm up, play, and go home.

That first season was bathed in burning light, the vivid memory of that millisecond of searing heat they could feel even from all the way over in the dugout, when Kennedy Alstott got incinerated. It was the inhuman rage in the Ump’s empty face, the shock that froze them in place on the bench. It had seemed absurd at the time – like Kennedy would pop up a moment later, like it was all some weird, sick joke. But they looked to the bench, saw some of them breaking down, some of them angry – god. Sure, Dot knew the Talkers had lost someone before to the flames, but it hadn’t seemed real until they’d seen the ashes, drifting away slowly, as if that was just something people could do, burn like that. That night, they pitched until two thirty in the morning, and then woke up at four and pitched again, and when people asked how they were doing, they said they were fine, thank you for asking.

When Tyler Violet went up in flames, and their roommate stepped onto the field, all sharp-edged grief and fiery determination and very little in the way of actual blaseball skill, Dot wanted to say something, but what were they going to say, really, so instead they sat there, stoic, nodding at their new recruit as they returned to the dugout, and that night they worked out until they were shaking and then went back to the silent field, not stopping until the sun rose, pale golden over the Atlantic.

They couldn’t break down. They were Polkadot Patterson, and they pitched, and they did not cry at games even when they missed their grandmother’s funeral because they were up in the rotation, even when they couldn’t stop hearing Alstott’s laugh for months and months after they died, when they lost another teammate to the damned feedback and there was nothing at all they could do to stop it.

Three seasons passed, and they never forgot that everything could end in an instant, but there were moments that snuck past their walls. Morse bringing them a latte, heavy foam just like they liked it, sitting with him in companionable silence for a bit. Ziwa’s little dance when they rounded back into the dugout after a big homer. Hobbs and Richmond goofing around before a game, Hobbs pretending he was too cool for it, Richmond just picking him up and spinning him around in wide circles.

They’d lie in bed and they would tell themselves they weren’t allowed to want to stay, like they had to remember they could go at anytime, that this was just a temporary stop. Hard to stop it from feeling like home, though, and that scared them more than anything.

And then, their fifth season with the Talkers. Watching, completely useless, from the dugout, as Cookbook burned, and Elijah, and Mclaughlin, and then the next goddamn day, Kiki, not even a payment, and Tony, and… they didn’t sleep for days, kept seeing the flames, kept seeing their faces, every time they closed their eyes. It was almost darkly funny to watch their pitching remain perfect, as they got to three and four days without sleep. Their hands shook and they could barely manage eating, but of course, their first game after that was a full 8-2 for the Talkers.

The team grieved. Morse would bring the wrong coffee in, once in a while, and then he’d just completely deflate, when he realized, his shoulders drooping, and McBlase would pick up someone else’s drink and look at it, choke it down like they didn’t know what else to do with it. Anyone with eyes could tell that Ziwa was barely holding it together, but they were trying so hard to support everyone around them, despite it. Even Garbage, usually unflappably positive, was slow and flat in her movements, looking like a shadow of herself. Sure, Dot was sad, in their own way, but in the face of this deep well… it would have been selfish, to let themselves break down. So they pitched their games well, because at least that’s something they could do, even if it was the only thing they could do.

Then the next big one - a collision of giants; the Moist Talkers’ ace versus Jaylen Hotdogfingers, with flames in her eyes and a pitch that warped reality around players, that put a bright red target on their back for the monsters that called themselves Rogue Umps. The innings dragged on and on; they tied and went to a tenth, then an eleventh.

Dot tried, with increasing force, to bring it to an end one way or another. At first it was, well, if they pitched well enough, they’d just win and it would be over. But Jaylen was good, and Jaylen was dangerous, and after the eighth inning, they started trying to throw the match instead.

They tried to wrench their arm off its fated path, twist any of their fingers towards a lob or a walk or anything that wasn’t another blazing fastball. Better a lost game than another dead teammate, they begged the thing inside them, the thing that had handed them the power, the ability they had always worked so hard for and wanted so badly, the thing that would not let them do anything to end this.

“THE PITCHER MUST THROW THE BALL,” it said, and their fingers curled around the ball again and threw perfect pitch after perfect pitch, as if they knew nothing else in the whole world but those strikeouts. They did not cry when Gloom congratulated them on a good game afterwards, their form flickering and wavering in the light. They did not cry when Ziwa looked at them, for just a moment, their face crestfallen and angry and scared, when it looked like they were stopping themselves from asking why.

Dot excused themselves and stole down into the basement of the stadium and locked themselves in a storage room and hammered those strange, blessed, cursed hands of theirs against the wall until bruises bloomed over the outermost fingers, and they found they still couldn’t cry, not even if they tried. The pitcher must not cry in blaseball. Was that one written in the book somewhere? The pitcher must watch all their teammates leave and die and do nothing at all to stop it. The pitcher will throw until everything is broken.

They thought about going back, tossing a few more hundred practice balls, as penance, but all of a sudden they were exhausted, completely worn out to the bone, so they slipped out through a back exit into the cool of the night.

Outside, they skirted the well-lit paths, hands shoved in their coat pockets, heading for their bus stop. They kept seeing it, over and over – the way Workman had doubled over, the way they wavered after, the way it was nearly impossible to look directly at them. The way they tried to compose themselves when they thought no one was looking, after, taking a deep, gulping breath, that confident smile falling away for any moment to reveal the fear they were choking down. And it was their fault. Partially, anyway. They’d played their part.


	4. The Only Thing You Can Do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dot has a conversation, one blessed/cursed pitcher to another, and makes a decision.

They were so tied up in their own thoughts as they came around to the bus stop that they didn’t realize someone else was there until they’d already taken a seat. The woman sitting on the other side of the bench sat stiffly, staring intently at a particular spot on the ground. She had thrown a sweater over the distinctive dark blue of her uniform, and pulled a cap low over her eyes, but Dot would recognize her anywhere – the pitcher who had stood across from them on the field, who had thrown the pitch that was making their friend waver in and out of reality, the pitch that be the end of them.

“Good game,” Jaylen said, at last, her face curling around the words, as if they were bitter in her mouth.

Dot remained silent, shutting their eyes and leaning back a bit against the backrest.

“The pitcher must throw the ball,” she said, softer, her confidence cracking just a little.

Dot opened their eyes again, looked over at the Garages’ revenant. In the puddled streetlight, she looked a lot less like a force of nature, and a lot more like a woman, one whose hands were shaking in her lap. One who had a horror breaking through the nonchalant mask she was trying to put up, the same kind of horror Dot saw on their own face late at night sometimes. They looked down at their own bruised hands.

“Yes.” Dot answered, nodding slowly.

A long moment of silence passed between them.

“You get it, don’t you,” said Jaylen, not looking at them. “You’re maybe one of the only ones that get it. That we didn’t ask for this. I know you didn’t. I didn’t want to… didn’t want any of this”

“I don’t know.” Dot admitted. In their mind they were seeing Workman, standing so bravely at the plate, no fear on their face. “Maybe this is just what the game is. Maybe there’s nothing we can do.”

“No.” said Jaylen, sharply, almost cutting them off. “No. I’m… I have a plan. I’m talking with some people that can help. I’m going to fix this.”

“How?” Dot breathed.

“I can’t say, not yet,” said the revenant, looking up now, to the dark clouds looming overhead. Dot wondered if she had noticed her fingers were now resting on her wrist, pressing into the artery beneath the fragile skin with surprising force. “But I refuse to believe I’m just back here to… to do this. I’m alive and that means I have to have a choice. I have to.”

The skies opened up, and rain began to fall, and Jaylen shivered.

“Where are the Garages?” Dot asked, impulsively.

“Where are the Talkers?” she countered, bristling. Then she seemed to reconsider, deflate a little. “You know how they all look at me. I‘d rather go home alone.”

“Do you need somewhere to stay? During this series?” Dot asked, looking away for a moment. “Not like… like that, I’m aroace. But I know what it’s like, to be alone after something like that.”

Jaylen looked back at them, looked like she was going to say something smart, then thought better of it, and just nodded.

Neither of them talked about it afterwards. But Dot was thinking about it, as the season drew to its end, as Workman hit their defiant homer and burned away to ash. They were thinking about it as the final pitches were thrown on day 99 of the season, as the teams waited anxiously for the mercurial god to make its appearance. Most of them were assembled, that day – any of the ones with Idolized players at least.

The skies darkened to blood-red, as York Silk, so small against the towering clouds, gasped as the Peanut appeared, suddenly, hanging like a juggernaut over the field. York clenched his fists, stared up at it with all the spitfire courage of a brave child. And Dot knew, then, deep inside their bones, through to every version of them, that they would not let York face that thing down.

They turned to the Talkers, smiled once, sadly.

“Thank you, for everything,” they said.

“Patterson, what…?” said Greer, but they’d already turned back and started out at a run as the Peanut began to descend, boomed its self-assured commandments to the assembly below.

“Wha…” York said, as they reached him, as the Peanut began to turn its terrible gaze to the Idolized, assembled below.

“Go back to the Fridays,” Dot said, everything in them entirely aligned, entirely theirs, if only for this moment. Those strange fingers of theirs all pointed in unison back to where the Fridays were assembled, and that frosty, unearthly tone that they had let infuse their voice lent gravitas to the command. “It’s okay.”

For a moment it looked as if the boy was going to refuse, but at the last moment he turned away, ran back to safety. Dot watched him go for a moment, and then turned their back to the angry god above, looked towards the team.

The Talkers looked afraid, and they wished they could apologise properly. They all deserved to be okay, especially after this whole season, and it wasn’t fair to have to leave them. But it had to be done. They wished they could apologize to everyone else too – their dad, their sister, their old friends, the people they’d called less and less until everything had dropped off. But this wasn’t the worst way it could have ended, not by a long shot. At least they had gotten the chance to take their place on the mound, to feel the wind whistle by their ear as they wound up, to feel the ball fly out of their palm, however many fingers they had to wrap around it.

“I BLESSED YOU, POLKADOT PATTERSON, AND NOW YOU ARE MINE.” The voice said, inside their head, and Dot smiled.

“No. I’m mine,” they said, quietly, just to themselves. “Always and forever.”

“We’ll get you back, Dot,” yelled Ziwa, Fish holding them back from making a run for it too. “I promise.”

Dot just smiled, took one last deep breath of autumn air, and then the shell closed around them, and everything was dark.


	5. Sunlight & the Squid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A crack in the shell, and a team welcomes their friend home.

The dreams played themselves out, over and over, a life lived in old film. They weren’t sure if they ever woke, not really. It was so quiet in there – no team chatter, no hubbub from the stands, no earbuds shoved in their ears as they left the field right after the game, no ominous commands from overbearing gods. It was just quiet, and occasional jostling – was the team moving them around? They knew that when Nagomi and Jessica had gotten shelled, they’d still been set out in the fields, to play outfield somehow, but there was pretty much no way that a pitcher, who didn’t field, was going to be useful to the game. Sometimes, movement made them afraid – what if they’d gotten feedbacked, in the shell? Other times, it just felt like being remembered, like at least they hadn’t put them in a dark storage room and forgotten about them.

They thought about the Talkers, a lot. In the shell, separate from everything, nothing their fault anymore, they let themselves be honest, for the first time in a long time. They missed their team, and they let themselves entertain that little hope that their team missed them too, even for more than just their pitching. Even if they’d never get out, even if they’d just kind of fade away eventually, they liked being carried around.

And then one day – a movement stranger than any before. The typical stumble and jostle of being carried, and then stillness for a moment. And then they were rising, fast enough to knock them off their knees, and then the whole shell, being rotated and twisted 360 degrees.

Dot braced themselves against the walls, wondered if this was the Peanut’s doing, wondered if this was finally it for them, permanently.

Then everything shattered, the shell around them cracking with an intensity that felt like it was splitting their skull in two, after so long in silence, and Dot had the light in their eyes for just a half moment before it was gone again. There was something incomprehensibly huge, incomprehensibly alive around them, and then they were out again, and there was a new voice reverberating in their head, as they gasped at the air rushing in around them, fresh and clean and moist.

“not an egg?” it asked, so much less demanding, and quieter, than the Peanut, and yet somehow deeper. They forced their eyes open, and two massive eyes met their aching gaze. This creature, strange and inhuman, seemed utterly devoid of anything as recognizable as malice or benevolence; it simply was what it was.

“No,” they said, their voice rough and barely above a whisper. “Not an egg.”

“hmph” it said, and then it was out of their head again, and – oh – so was the Peanut and all its blustered commands, and it was setting them down sort of gently into the field, and the light burned in their eyes so they screwed them shut and rolled over, their entire body aching. Another long moment; the Monitor said something else, but they didn’t process any of it.

And then there were being picked up, cradled to someone’s chest – oh, warmth, and sunlight, and air, the way it burned so beautifully – and they were being carried, at what must have been nearly a run. There were voices, people speaking, either to them or to each other, they couldn’t tell. And then they were set down on something soft, and they tried to focus, tried to figure out whether this was just another dream.

“They seem to be in good health,” one of them was saying – Mooney? “Close the blinds, they’ll be sensitive to light…”

“Patterson?” another one said, and there was a hand on their shoulder, just gently. Dot groaned, shifted a little.

“Am… Am I…” they rasped, trailing off when they realized they didn’t know what they were saying.

“We got you out,” said Ziwa, and Dot could hear the smile in their voice, an incredulousness, like they couldn’t believe they’d managed to do it, like they were so, so happy it had worked.

They forced their eyes open again and there they were, the Talkers, gathered around them, watching anxiously, like they missed them, like they cared, and all of a sudden Dot couldn’t believe they’d ever thought otherwise. The team had gotten them out – they’d done it, they’d come back for them.

“Dot? Are you okay?” one of them asked, and Dot realized they were crying now, for the first time in a long time in front of anyone, because they knew that, for better or for worse, they were home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for anyone reading this: thank you for getting this far!! hope you enjoyed it :)


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